| WIKI | FAQ | Tech FAQ | |
 http://csua.com/feed/ | |
| ||||||
| 5/25 |
| 2005/6/7-8 [Politics/Domestic/Abortion, ERROR, uid:38016, category id '18005#14.6967' has no name! , ] UID:38016 Activity:high |
6/7 Monkey Business (NYT article on monkeys and economics):
http://csua.org/u/ca5
\_ How can the Freakonomics authors have any credibility with what's
left of their "when abortion is legal, crime goes down" theory?
http://www.freakonomics.com/ch4.php
http://www.isteve.com/abortion.htm
With a dubious claim on an inflammatory topic from people degreed
to such a high level, the burden is clearly on the authors to
demonstrate their theory with very high confidence, and I don't see
that.
\_ The http://isteve.com link is playing very loose with its comparisons.
I haven't seen the freakonomics research, but their synopsis
indicates a wider data base than the age 14-17 homocide rate
data on the http://isteve.com page. Just at first glance, this page
is doing serious apples to oranges crap.
\_ Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with you, but abortion is
is an incredibly inflammatory topic and the involvement of
American Conservative magazine here isn't exactly reassuring.
\_ Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with you either, but the
Freakonomics authors aren't doing much to dispel the notion of
the Liberal Elite.
\_ I think the people actually running the country and making
most of the policy decisions have done enough to dispel
the notion that any of the Elite are particularly Liberal.
\_ I sincerely hope so. To the independents at least.
\_ I am not a liberal, but I find the 'abortion has a
positive effect on crime rate' hypothesis interesting, and
worthy of further investigation. Your comment is kind of
dumb. -- ilyas
\_ ilyas, are you trying to out-compete tom on calling
people dumb while signing your name?
\_ I called the comment dumb, not the person. Even
smart people say stupid things sometimes. Tom is
the reigning king of ad hominem, I wouldn't dream of
trying to dethrone him. -- ilyas
\_ ilyas, your comments have been kind of dumb.
Even smart people say stupid things sometimes.
\_ Are you talking about something in this thread
or going off on a tangent? -- ilyas
\_ What is tangential about your opinion that
my comment is kind of dumb, and my opinion
that your comments are kind of dumb?
\_ he is not a liberal. He just make conclusion based upon
satistics, not political correctness. If you think he
is a libera, look at this: he is the same guy who
said that having a swimming pool in the house is much
more dangerous than having a gun in the house.
you think a Liberal will allow that to published?
\_ A claim from http://isteve.com debunks Freakonomics? What a load of
he said she said. That having been said, the anectdotal image
monkeys trading is amusing and thought-provoking.
\_ The bar is very low in this case, because the theory is so
spectacular as well as political. All you need to do is cast
doubt.
It's just as if you presented the case that black people are
physiologically dumber than white people. You need to back up
such a theory with very high confidence. On the opposite
side, all you need to do is cast doubt.
\_ I don't see why a 'controversial' theory should require
any proof over and above normal. It may be good to provide
more proof _for practical reasons_, but I don't think this
is required for the underlying science to be good.
Requiring greater burden on 'controversial' theories is a
very dangerous practice, because you can always drum up
controversy to silence the science you don't like. By the
way, doubt is good in science. Doubt is only bad in
religion. -- ilyas
\_ In an ideal world, what you write would be highly
persuasive.
\_ No duh. |
| 5/25 |
|
| csua.org/u/ca5 -> www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html&OQ=pagewantedQ3Dall&OP=28d4eb19/~mZk~lQ3AQ60T-Q3AQ3AAQ2B~Q2Beev~en~ev~Q5CS0SMqQ5DZ~evacrQ22J@HAQ5CE Help FREAKONOMICS Monkey Business By STEPHEN J DUBNER and STEVEN D LEVITT Published: June 5, 2005 Can capuchins understand money? |
| www.freakonomics.com/ch4.php Buy "Freakonomics" Chapter 4: Where Have All the Criminals Gone? What Nicolae Ceausescu learned-the hard way-about abortion . Jane Roe, cri me stopper: how the legalization of abortion changed everything. Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, and one that woul d take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v . Wade was hitting its late teen years-the years during which young men enter their criminal prime-the rate of crime began to fall. What this co hort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest ch ance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an e ntire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wa nted to bring a child into the world. This theory is bound to provoke a variety of reactions, ranging from disb elief to revulsion, and a variety of objections, ranging from the quotid ian to the moral. The likeliest first objection is the most straightforw ard one: is the theory true? Perhaps abortion and crime are merely corre lated and not causal. It may be more comforting to believe what the newspapers say, that the dr op in crime was due to brilliant policing and clever gun control and a s urging economy. We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to thi ngs we can touch or feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon. W e believe especially in near-term causes: a snake bites your friend, he screams with pain, and he dies. But when it co mes to cause and effect, there is often a trap in such open-and-shut thi nking. We smirk now when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faul ty causes-the warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their rap ing of a virgin that brought them victory on the battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he has a vested interest. How, then, can we tell if the abortion-crime link is a case of causality rather than simply correlation? One way to test the effect of abortion on crime would be to measure crime data in the five states where abortion was made legal before the Suprem e Court extended abortion rights to the rest of the country. In New York, California, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, a woman had been able to obtain a legal abortion for at least two years before Roe v Wa de. And indeed, those early-legalizing states saw crime begin to fall ea rlier than the other forty-five states and the District of Columbia. Bet ween 1988 and 1994, violent crime in the earlylegalizing states fell 13 percent compared to the other states; between 1994 and 1997, their murde r rates fell 23 percent more than those of the other states. What else might we l ook for in the data to establish an abortion-crime link? One factor to l ook for would be a correlation between each state's abortion rate and it s crime rate. Sure enough, the states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990s, while stat es with low abortion rates experienced smaller crime drops. There are even more correlations, positive and negative, that shore up th e abortion-crime link. |
| www.isteve.com/abortion.htm com, Graphs, Data and Links empirically analyzing economist Steven D Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory as found in his bestseller Freakonomics. In short, Levitt's theory badly fails straightf orward historical tests of plausibility; and his simplistic model of hum an behavior (abortion reduces unwanted births) is called into question b y his own admission that the much larger effect of legalizing abortion w as to increase unwanted pregnancies, thus making the effects highly unce rtain. article showing (left) that c ontra Levitt's theory, the first generation born after legalized abortio n became the most violent juveniles in recent American history; and (rig ht) that contra Levitt's theory that legalizing abortion would increase the wantedness of children, the illegitimacy rate soared. Chic ago Sun-Times, finally called his bluff on his abortion-cut-crime theory . Perhaps that's why he has now deigned to answer some of his critics. Levitt makes no attempt to defend his battered "wantedness" theory of how abortion is supposed to cut crime, but instead merely restates his inte rpretations of the historical data. initial arguments: First, let's start by reviewing the basic facts that support the Donohue- Levitt hypothesis that legalized abortion in the 1970s explains a substa ntial part of the crime decline in the 1990s: Right away, Levitt tries to rig the deck in his favor by defining the que stion as whether legalized abortion caused in large measure the drop in crime in the 1990s. The answers to that question can be either "Yes" or "No." Neutral observers tend to react to disagreements by splitting the difference. So, in this case, the natural assumption of people who don't want to wade through all the arguments would be: "It had probably some effect on cutting crime." And that means Levitt is seen as being more or less right. In reality, however, we should be looking at the more general question: " What was the effect of legalizing abortion on serious crime from the 197 0s onward?" The answers to this question can be "It cut crime," "It had no effect," or "It increased crime." Given those three options, observer s are likely to split the difference and say: "It had no effect." So, Le vitt cleverly tries to narrow the focus to where he'll be given the bene fit of the doubt. Crime s tarted falling three years earlier in these states, with property crime (done by younger people) falling before violent crime. Actually, it's much more complicated than this because ten other states " liberalized" abortion laws in 1970. But, for now, let's just look at tho se five that outright legalized it. Two of those states are Hawaii and A laska, which are hardly representative of the rest of the country, and a third is far-off Washington state. The big two early legalizers were Ca lifornia and New York. Yet, Levitt admits in another place in his respon se: The homicide rate of young males (especially young Black males) temporari ly skyrocketed in the late 1980s, especially in urban centers like Los A ngeles, New York City, and Washington, DC... And Washington DC largely had de facto legal abortion from 1970, too. S o, according to Levitt, those three cities are where, purely by coincide nce, the teen crack wars broke out about 17-18 years after abortion was legalized. Now that correlation between legalizing abortion and increase d teen violence isn't proof of anything, but it obviously raises the que stion of whether or not legalized abortion contributed to crack killings . No, what Levitt wants to talk about is not what happened about 17-21 year s after abortion was legalized, but what happened about 22-24 years late r The longer the lag between the effect and the hypothesized cause, the more Dr. If abortion has an effect, it should show up earlier in life, before more adult experience has intervened. Si milarly, the effect of legalizing abortion is most trustworthy earlier i n history, before too many intervening changes have gotten in the way of a clean read. And the violence grew fastest among the demographic group with the highes t abortion rate: blacks. Levitt also claims "with property crime (done by younger people) falling before violent crime." Look, property crime apparently began falling in the mid 1970s, probably due to "target-hardening." Property crime statis tics are less reliable than violent crime statistics because the victims frequently don't get a look at the perpetrator so we don't know the age , and the cops vary tremendously over time and place in how much they ca re about catching property criminals . The FBI provides much better quality data on homicides (which cops care a bout a lot) and serious violent crimes (which "includes rape, robbery, a ggravated assault, and homicide") from the annual crime victimization su rvey. So, that's two totally different methodologies measuring two kinds of crime, but they agree closely on the history, which is that the firs t generation born after legalized abortion were the most violent teens i n the history of American crime statistics. Levitt is misleading when he implies that younger people don't commit muc h violence. The worst year for serious violent crime by ages 12-17 was 1 993, when this cohort (all born after abortion was legalized) committed 27% of all serious violent crimes. Moreover, children under 18 accounted for over half of the big increase in serious violent crimes between the mid-1980s and 1993. I'm going to lump the next three of Levitt's arguments together: 2) After abortion was legalized, the availability of abortions differed d ramatically across states. In some states like North Dakota and in parts of the deep South, it was virtually impossible to get an abortion even after Roe v Wade. If one compares states that had high abortion rates i n the mid 1970s to states that had low abortion rates in the mid 1970s, you see the following patterns with crime. For the period from 1973-1988 , the two sets of states (high abortion states and low abortion states) have nearly identical crime patterns. Note, that this is a period before the generations exposed to legalized abortion are old enough to do much crime. So this is exactly what the Donohue-Levitt theory predicts. But from the period 1985-1997, when the post Roe cohort is reaching peak cri me ages, the high abortion states see a decline in crime of 30% relative to the low abortion states. For people born before abortion legalizati on, there is no difference in the crime patterns for high abortion and l ow abortion states, just as the Donohue-Levitt theory predicts. Data by state is extremely tricky because women travel across state lines to get abortions. Arrest rates vary by state and change over time too in all sorts of ways. Further, states like North Dakota are largely irrelevant to national crim e trends. Here, I'm going to turn to a not-yet-published paper by Ted Joyce, an eco nomist with the National Bureau of Economic Research and Baruch College, City University of New York. In this paper, Joyce tries hard to remove the effects of crack crime from the data. First, I examine closely the effects of changes in abortion rates between 1971 and 1974. Changes in abortion rates during this period were dramat ic, varied widely by state, had a demonstrable effect on fertility, and were more plausibly exogenous than changes in the late 1970s and early 1 980s. If abortion reduced crime, crime should have fallen sharply as the se post-legalization cohorts reached their late teens and early 20s, the peak ages of criminal involvement. Second, I conduct separate estimates for whites and blacks because the ef fect of legalized abortion on crime should have been much larger for bla cks than whites, since the effect of legalization of abortion on the fer tility rates of blacks was much larger. There was little race difference in the reduction in crime. Finally, I compare changes in homicide rates before and after legalizatio n of abortion, within states, by single year of age. The analysis of old er adults is compelling because they were largely unaffected by the crac k-cocaine epidemic, which was a potentially important confoundin... |
| isteve.com com columnist, and founder of the Human Bi odiversity Institute, which runs the invitation-only Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals. posting below abo ut Fryer and Torelli's study showing that Hispanics lose more same-race friends the higher their GPA than do blacks, a college professor writes: Your post on educational attitudes among Hispanics and blacks is consiste nt with my impressions in in the classroom. Apathy towards learning seem s widespread among Hispanics. Curious whites are much more common (thoug h not common enough), and among whites and even blacks you have the type of person who is not particularly smart, but who is motivated to play t he intellectual. But rarely do I see Hispanics who like to get into a di scussion about things--to explore ideas for curiosity's sake, or to proj ect the image of a smart person. When I see this among black students, it seems like they are simply not getting it; I h aven't seen them say that someone is trying to be better than them if th ey act smart, but I have heard this is what you will be told if you exce l in school. The gap between whites and Hispanics in average IQ is only about 65% as l arge as the gap between whites and blacks, as is the gap between whites and American-born Hispanics on the NAEP achievement test, but Hispanics do worse than blacks on certain measures of quantity of schooling, when their higher average IQs suggest they should be getting more schooling. Come to think of it, Asians don't seem particularly curious--just very dr iven and competitive. That's the same thing you see when looking at who wins the science Nobel Prizes: white guys ask the big, hard questions. is much larger in integr ated schools, and b) that the social cost for high grades is greatest fo r.. Another reader responds: Isn't one obvious reason why blacks and Hispanics with better grades have fewer friends of the same race (or "race" for Hispanics) simply the fac t that the ones with better grades are likely to have more white classma tes and white friends? Likewise, perhaps low-achieving whites have more black and Hispanic friends. I assume that having more friends of one kin d means fewer of another! Another reader writes: It would have been interesting to see, for black and Hispanic high achiev ers, how many white friends each had. In other words, how much all this is basically about students making friends in their academic-achievement class, rather than in their race-ethnic class. I suspect black high ach ievers have more white friends now than do Hispanic ones, but perhaps I am wrong. And that might not fit all the other ancient axes the Post has to grind. One also suspects that, in the old days of either pure segregation in the South or ability-tracking in the North, that high-achieving blacks were much more popular and admired by their fellow blacks than they perhaps are today. Blacks could then feel pride in and identify a bit with the m ost talented of their fellow blacks, while still feeling they shared man y of the same experiences. Now, I think the same exceptional levels of a chievement among poor-performing minorities are taken as a signal of sep aration from the main group, which is probably what is happening. paper that: "substitution towards other race friendships doe s not fully explain the stark difference in the popularity achievement gradient." In other words, in an integrated school, a smart black kid in the AP cl asses would acquire more white friends, but not as many as he'd lose bla ck friends. This doesn't necessarily mean that black students intentiona lly penalize black high achievers. They just have less contact with them and less in common with them. So, once again we come back to the brute fact that on average whites are smarter than blacks, and that most other effects hypothesized about the white-black education gap are marginalia . Kerry told him, "I must have been drinking the nig ht before I took that military aptitude test. Today, Michael Kranish reports in the Boston Globe: During last year's presidential campaign, John F Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W Bush was t he populist who mangled his sentences. But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually ident ical grade average at Yale University four decades ago. In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had r eceived a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year. Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his f our years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D's in his f reshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years. The grade transcript, which Kerry has always declined to release, was inc luded in his Navy record. During the campaign the Globe sought Kerry's n aval records, but he refused to waive privacy restrictions for the full file. Late last month, Kerry gave the Navy permission to send the docume nts to the Globe. Kerry appeared to be responding to critics who suspected that there might be damaging information in the file about his activities in Vietnam. Th e military and medical records, however, appear identical to what Kerry has already released. This marks the first time Kerry's grades have been publicly reported. The mind simply ree ls at the possibility that Kerry refused for two years to fully release his Navy records because he didn't want people to know he got slightly l ower grades at Yale than Bush. Could the ego on a man really be that big and that fragile? Considering how disturbed Kerry was by my report on his IQ versus Bush's -- on the air with Brokaw, he laughed it off adeptly, but after the came ra was off, he was so bothered by it that he returned to the topic to ma ke the excuse that he must have been out drinking (as Brokaw told Don Im us a few days later) -- the answer may well be: yes, Kerry's ego was wra pped up in being smarter than Bush. Declaring war on declarative sentences, " the candidate repeatedly insisted on padding out the well-written spee ches his staff gave him with meaningless improvisations: The campaign gives reporters the text of each of Kerry's speeches "as pre pared for delivery," apparently to show how much Kerry diverges from the m.. Kerry proves incapable of reading simple declarative sentences. He insert s dependent clauses and prepositional phrases until every sentence is a watery mess. Kerry couldn't read a Dick and Jane book to schoolchildren without transforming its sentences into complex run-ons worthy of David Foster Wallace. Kerry's speechwriters routinely insert the line "We can bring back that mighty dream," near the conclusion of his speeches, pres umably as an echo of Ted Kennedy's Shrum-penned "the dream will never di e" speech from the 1980 Democratic convention. Kerry flubs his punch lines, sprinkles in irrelevant anecdotes, and talks himself into holes that he has trouble improvising his way out of. He s teps on his applause lines by uttering them prematurely, and then when t hey roll up on his TelePrompTer later, he's forced to pirouette and thro at-clear until he figures out how not to repeat himself. He piles adject ive upon adjective until it's like listening to a speech delivered by Ro get. Kerry's health-care speech Monday in Tampa was a classic of the form. The written text contained a little more than 2,500 words. By the time he w as finished, Kerry had spoken nearly 5,300 wordsnot including his intro ductory remarks and thank-yous to local politiciansmore than doubling t he verbiage. In contrast, Bush was smart enough to keep his ego from getting in the wa y of competent campaigning. If he didn't think his speeches were good en ough the way they were written, he'd get new speechwriters, not try to f ix them on the fly himself. wrote: In the President's lone losing race, his 1978 run for Congress from West Texas, the victor stressed Bush's two Ivy League degre... |